identity, immigrants performed usable pasts that stressed their racial and cultural compatibility with Americanism. In ritual commemorations of the nation, this identity generated a visual economy that was intended to ingrain into newcomers a cultural and racial whiteness: draped in American flags, dressed in ancient togas or in the alternatively uniform costumes of Masonic lodges, immigrants marched in arrangements tailored to the expectations of their new national affiliation. Through their physical discipline and standardization of dress, they came to embody the values of the racialized nation. Highly stylized, the folk past was relegated to the margins, still holding symbolic significance as a link with antiquity—folk dances, for example, continued to be featured at AHEPA events—but being largely devalued as incompatible to American modernity. The configuration on the steps of the U.S. Treasury was superseded by a body politic that performed its ethnic ancestry in a manner that privileged “the externally directed model” of ideological Hellenism over the Romeic model of Greek identity (Herzfeld 1986a, 23). It visually inscribed the narrative of Greek cultural continuity in the political economy of American whiteness.
Mapping Ethnicity onto Race: From New Immigrants to White Ethnics (1970s)
I now move forward to the 1960s and 1970s to focus on a period that witnessed the articulation of a new social category, that of the white ethnic. A product of the volatile racial politics during the civil rights era, this classification sought to impose cultural coherence on and, in turn, to harvest the political potential of the descendants of the new immigrants. On the one hand, it advocated antiassimilationism, ethnic revitalization, and a return to the roots. On the other hand, coming “into existence as a labeled group in response to the civil rights and black power movements and the allied organizing of Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans” (di Leonardo 1994, 170), it operated as a potent political force in the competition for cultural and material resources.
“I am born of PIGS—those Poles, Italians, Greeks and Slavs,” Michael Novak (1971, 53) provocatively framed his confessional narrative, in an apparent intermeshing of personal and collective politics. A pioneer account in the now popular genre of growing up ethnic, this autobiographical work provided a testimony of how subtle and not-so-subtle coercion—by peers and institutions—and gentle encouragement—by wary immigrant parents bearing the scars of racism—led to ethnic self-effacement. An intellectual who professed a politics “rooted in the social and earthy sensibility of Catholic experience” (70), Novak claimed to give public voice to a collective that had been forced into silence. “The PIGS are not silent willingly” (53), he wrote. “The silence burns like hidden coals in the chest” (ibid.). The son of Slovak immigrants, Novak shattered this silence with all the intellectual might, eloquence, and political acumen that he had mastered in the corridors of the academy as a professor of philosophy and religious studies. He adopted the position of an intellectual committed to advancing the interests of white ethnics by articulating a sense of profound rage and discontent. “Such a tide of resentment begins to overwhelm the descendant of the ‘new immigration’ when he begins to voice repressed feelings about America,” he wrote. “[A]t first his throat clogs with despair” (61). The authorial exposé of private thoughts and feelings becomes a necessary step toward collective empowerment. “So the risks of letting one’s own secrets out of the bag are rather real,” he noted, casting his testimony as a vital crossing of boundaries between the private and the public.
The category “white ethnic” was crucial for Novak’s function as an intellectual who wished to advance the interests of an underrepresented and maligned population, the PIGS. The self-ascription PIGS itself—“an insulting, self-polluting label” (Abrahams and Kalcik 1978, 233)—makes the claim of “belong[ing] to the margins of society rather than [being] part of the center or establishment … [and] reverses the assimilation process and brings down on ethnics’ heads the charge of being different, non-Anglo” (233–34). This politics drew from a textbook case of panethnic identity construction: the making of a common cultural and historical experience and the subsequent construction of uniqueness through difference. White ethnics were assigned a shared history of discrimination, a cultural content, national and familial loyalties, close-knit solidarity, neighborliness, work ethic, attachment to locality, patriotism, and modesty. And, as the title of one section attests—“Neither WASP nor Jew nor Black”—this entity was sharply differentiated from what the author construed as rival social groups. Presented as different from “‘middle America’ (so complacent, smug, nativist, and Protestant)” (Novak 1971, 57), white ethnics were also removed from an arrogant and privileged liberal establishment. But they also kept a safe distance from radicalism, abstaining from interfacing with Jewish and black politics.
“Confessions of a White Ethnic” intervened in the ethnic politics of its era, purporting to represent white ethnics from an insider’s viewpoint. Novak wrote bitterly: “If you are a descendant of southern and eastern Europeans, everyone else has defined your existence. A pattern of ‘Americanization’ is laid out. You are catechized, cajoled, and condescended to by guardians of good Anglo-Protestant attitudes. You are chided by Jewish libertarians. Has ever a culture been so moralistic?” (62). Boldly entering into the fray of polemic ethnic politics, Novak spoke on behalf of the working-class and lower-middle-class ethnics—the laborers, “small businessmen, agents for corporations perhaps” (56), shoving their raging discontent in the face of 1970s America. Conscious of their parents’ humiliation as immigrants and forced to hide their ethnicity, the story goes, white ethnics played the WASP game, only to discover that the game was rigged. Their struggle to escape social marginality and economic stagnation was “blocked at every turn” (ibid.). Excluded from liberal-black political coalitions, denigrated as parochial, conservative, and racist by intellectuals, oppressed by middle America, silenced and misrepresented by the media, excluded by curricula and preservation societies, the white ethnic emerged as a profoundly resentful collective subject. “[F]eeling cheated” (ibid.) and abandoned, white ethnics witnessed the liberal sympathy extended to racial minorities while they themselves absorbed the scorn of East Coast intellectuals, who failed “to engage the humanity of the modest, ordinary little man west of the Hudson” (59).
Novak’s victimizing populism articulated ethnic dissatisfaction and resentment to subsequently harness it for a specific antiassimilationist and antimodernist agenda: the return to ethnic roots. His “politics of cultural pluralism, a politics of family and neighborhood, a politics of smallness and quietness” (8), sought to revive what he saw as the communitarian ethos that was stripped away from the immigrant Gemeinschaft. Indicting modernity for this outcome, he enumerated its ills. The culprit in this polemic was the modern individual, culturally disconnected and alienated, incapable of long-term ties and commitments, who resigned himself to the mercy of the free marketplace. Novak tenuously connected atomism, transience, and corporate capitalism. “Becoming modern,” in his view “is a matter of learning to be solitary,” to experience a life where “nothing [is] permanent, everything [is] discardable” (68). The assault on immigrant traditions—effected by militant assimilationism in the past and secular humanism in the present—devalues roots and disdains “mystery, ritual, transcendence, soul, absurdity, and tragedy” (67) in the name of rationality and progress. What this reconfiguration enables, according to Novak, is the making of ethnic subjects amenable to the demands of rational and individualized corporate culture. White ethnics—an inherent component of “network people,” as “socially textured selves, not individuals” (68)—functioned as a bulwark against this specific kind of assimilation. “Part of Americanizing the Indian, the slave, or the immigrant [was] to dissolve network people into atomic people. Some people resisted the acid. They refused to melt. These are the unmeltable ethnics” (69).
“[L]osing the sharp lust to become ‘American’” (4), the sons and daughters of the new immigrants are transformed here into white ethnics. Anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo (1994) has dissected the emergence of this category in the 1960s, illustrating its relation to the social and political currents of the time and to the specific interests it served. She bluntly maintains that the construct of “white ethnic community” as a homogeneous, working-class, close-knit set of coherent urban communities constituted an invented American tradition in
